Universities & Colleges

When I began my academic career, most of my effort focused on teaching, research and advising. Over the years, administrative tasks have devoured more and more of my time. One of the most ravenous beasts in the administrative pack is assessment. This data is now critical for accreditation and an essential part of how state funding is allocated under the punitive performance-based funding system that the state has imposed on public higher education.

Back when assessment became part of the bureaucracy, the main goal was to fill binders with paper containing outcome data. After several years of this, there was a realization that outcome data by itself did not show the value added by the educational process. To use an obvious analogy, if you just looked at the times of a cross country team at the end of the season with a new coach, you would be hard pressed to determine the impact of the coach. Because of this, measuring improvement eventually became a thing to do.

As part of the current assessment project, I am required (but not actually paid—it is not part of my official assigned responsibilities) to collect data from the classes in philosophy and religion that measures improvement in the courses. To this end, I have used an obvious approach: assessing draft papers and comparing them to the final papers. However, I also need other statistical data and the more objective the better. To this end, I created an Argument Basics Assessment Instrument (ABAI, because bureaucracy loves acronyms) which is being developed into a standardized “test” to be used in the classes. The objective of the ABAI is to determine student starting ability and their ending ability in the course. This approach is obviously not perfect, since the improvement could be due to other factors—such as skills and knowledge acquired in other courses. There are also some problems inherent to before and after assessment in a class.

One obvious problem is motivation. If the students know the assessment device does not count towards their grade, they are far less likely to take it seriously or even do it. This will tend to bias the results towards poor performance. If the device is used as part of their grade, then there are many concerns. Cheating becomes a factor, which can make the data less accurate. Also, students are more likely to try to prepare for such assessment, which can throw off the results when it is intended to get before data (and even after data). For example, if the first ABAI counted as a grade, then students might study argument basics before taking the ABAI and the assessment would reflect studying rather than their starting point. As such, the challenge is a dilemma: if the assessment does not count towards the grade, then students will tend to not take it seriously and this will skew the results in a negative way. If the assessment does count towards their grade, students would be more inclined to prepare for the assessment and perhaps even cheat, thus skewing the results. One, perhaps morally questionable approach to solving this problem, is to surprise students with the assessment and not reveal whether it counts or not. Another approach is to be honest with the students and note in the assessment report that the results will be biased based on the approach taken.

Another obvious problem is that if the assessment devices count towards the grade, then the “before” assessments will tend to have poor results which could hurt the students’ grades. A solution is to scale the first assessment, but this can cause the students to take it less seriously. Another solution is to count only the “after” assessment, but this runs into the same problem. In the case of paper drafts used for before/after assessment, students generally tend to put effort into the drafts when they are optional. But this tends to skew the results because the better students tend to do drafts. When drafts are mandatory but do not count towards the grade, then many students tend to not take them seriously, which skews the results.

The cynical approach is obvious: simply pick the method that generates the sort of data the bureaucracy wants (which is usually that X% of students improve Y%). A less cynical approach is to test various methods to see what seems to yield the most accurate results—but there is the obvious problem of calibrating the system. After all, assessing the assessment leads to the sort of infinite regress that plagues epistemology: how do you know the method is accurate? If you use a method to assess the method, then one must ask how you know that method is accurate. And so on, into infinity. Not surprisingly, the bureaucracy tends to avoid peering to deeply under the hood.

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While upward mobility is far more limited than the American myths would have us believe, there is the story that college helps people move up the economic ladder. My family story nicely fits this narrative. My father’s parents did not finish high school—they had to take jobs to help support their families. My father not only finished high school, he ended up getting a master’s degree, taught high school for years and eventually taught mathematics at the college level. I earned my PhD and am currently part of the liberal conspiracy that masquerades as American education. As with the general American tale, my family moved up the economic rungs thanks to higher education. Because of this, I am in favor of college education for those who want it.

While college has never been cheap, recent years have seen an absurd increase in the cost of higher education that has greatly outpaced inflation. The reasons are quite clear. First, states have generally disinvested from public higher education. Some of this is a residue from when the financial sector burned down the economy, much of it is political choice. Some of this is ideological: Republicans now tend to oppose the idea of funding public colleges, preferring to channel money into the private sector. There is also the practical reason that weakening public education helps push students towards for-profit colleges—who have lobbied Republicans and Democrats. With less public support, more of the burden falls on students and their families.

Second, there is massive administrative bloat. Some of this bloat is in the form of the numbers of administrators—there are now assistant deans, associate deans, and deans. Some of this is due to burdens imposed by the state, such as assessment and enforcing various education laws. Some of it is due to the mad obsession of colleges to be like business: many now have such things as marketing departments who talk endlessly about the brand. There is also the natural tendency of bureaucrats to expand their bureaucracy. At this time, it is standard for schools to have entire cadres of administrators who have no direct connection to education or the educational mission at all. Administrative tasks are also now commonly assigned to faculty—thus requiring hiring more people to teach as their teaching time is devoured by these tasks.

In addition to the ever-increasing number of administrators there has also been a significant increase in their salaries, especially at the higher levels. It is not unheard of for university presidents to have salaries close to a million dollars and bonuses are standard practice. This is also a result of the business model: high paid “management” ruling over lower paid “workers.” While administrators advance arguments about how top money is needed to attract top talent from the private sector (usual business), the same arguments seem to never apply to faculty. Presumably because faculty are not as important to the mission of the university as administrators.

Third, there is the cost of fancy facilities and amenities. Some of this is certainly reasonable: smart classrooms with computers, wi-fi and such are more expensive than the traditional dumb classroom. Other luxury items mainly serve to drive up costs.

Since college does provide a way to advance up the ladder or at least get a strong grip on the rung, it is important to address the problem of high costs. While one solution has been to make colleges “free”, this runs into the obvious problem that there is no such thing as free college. “Free” college just shifts the cost burden—which can be a solution to the problems of some while potentially creating problems for others. This shift can, however, be morally and economically justified—but the discussion needs to be honest about who is paying for the college.

A less drastic solution is for states to return to investing strongly in education. This was once seen as a good idea on the obvious grounds that the money spent on students was returned many times over as well as on the non-economic positive returns on the investment. This does run against current trends, which is to funnel money towards those with the best lobbyists and fattest campaign contributions.

It would also help if the state reduced some of the imposed administrative burden on colleges. While this would have a negative impact on those employed in these administrative offices, it would help reduce the cost of education. The challenge is, however, sorting out which administrative burdens to lessen. Reducing administrative positions and salaries would also help.

The number of administrators could be brought back to the older ratios of administrators to everyone else and their salaries could be reduced to more closely match those of faculty. While it could be argued that this would cut down on the top talent, there are some obvious responses. One is that education obviously attracts top talent faculty who are willing to work for relatively low salaries. So, if the administrative logic were good, then the faculty should be terrible. Another is that the various scandals and problems have shown what these top dollars buy.

Finally, schools can also cut their spending on facilities and things that are not truly relevant to their educational mission. There are, of course, other possibilities but these would be a good start.

It could be contended that since Ronell is a woman, she really could not sexually harass a man. After all, men can easily resist women, and some might go so far as to claim that men are always happy to have the attention of a woman.

Sexual harassment is not about simply about physical power, but about a general disparity in power. While men tend to occupy the positions of power, a woman in such a position can use that power against the men beneath her. Given Ronell’s position and status, she enjoyed a considerable advantage over Reitman. In general terms, any disparity of power allows for the greater potential of sexual harassment, regardless of whether a man or a woman has the upper hand.

In terms of men always enjoying the attention of women, that is clearly not true. In cases in which the attention is inflicted, men are even less likely to enjoy this attention. For the most part, men at work or at school most likely want to do their jobs or engage in their education without being harassed by their bosses or professors. As such, the idea that men cannot be harassed is absurd.

One might also try to defend Ronell by pointing out that she is a famous feminist and that the values of feminism preclude such bad behaviour. It is, of course, easy enough to reply to this defense. While I will focus on feminism as the defense, the points I make can apply to almost any defense that a person could not harass because they profess certain values.

While most varieties of feminism do include a condemnation of using power to coerce people in a sexual context, there could be versions that do not address this in the case of men. Since it is possible to craft any sort of theory, there could even be a form of feminism in which this behavior is acceptable—but this would certainly be a morally problematic theory. While holding to such a view would explain a person’s behavior, it would hardly defend it. That is, saying that what a person did was not wrong because they do not think it is wrong would not be very effective as a defense.

One obvious fact about professing values is that one can do so without subscribing to those values. There are many reasons why people engage in such a deceit, such as wishing to appear to be a certain sort of person for an advantage. For example, a person might profess the values of feminism as part of fitting in and advancing in an academic climate that values and rewards professing this view. Obviously enough, a person who merely professes the values of feminism without subscribing to them could easily act in violation of those values. As such, mere expression of values does not show that a person could not have engaged in harassment.

Another obvious fact is that even those who subscribe to a set of values do not always act in accord with those values. People often find it too hard to do what they believe they should do or too easy to do what they think is wrong. For example, I accept that eating meat produced by factory farms is morally wrong, yet I still eat such meat. In the case of feminism, a person could accept the view that people should not be coerced and harassed in a sexual context yet fail to live up to that principle. They might be overcome with desire or subject to some other factors that enables them to act against their own principles.

People can also act in wilful ignorance by rationalizing their violations of their own principles or by refusing to see these violations for what they are. For example, what the victim perceives as harassment and coercion might be seen by the harasser as a consensual relationship. It is, to be fair, possible that a person is not engaged in wilful ignorance, but simple ignorance. That is, they are honestly unaware that they are engaged in what they would regard as bad behavior. For example, I accidentally fed a vegan friend a vegetarian burger that contained whey protein (milk) because I had no idea that it contained milk. As such, I did something wrong—but only because I had no idea about the milk. Returning to the case at hand, the professor might have been unaware of how the student felt—which leads to a broad and controversial area of accountability for knowing things and the division of responsibility. In the case of power disparities, there can be special problem—the person in the weaker position can be worried to say what they feel and thus the person with the greater power would not know. This is, of course, why it is generally not good for people in positions of power to have relationships with those under them, such as graduate students.

While this case is not the first incident of a woman found to have sexually harassed a man, it is also not going to be the last. While the #MeToo movement is, once again, bringing sexual harassment into the media spotlight there is the fact that women are entering more positions of power and that the old gender roles and expectations are changing. As such, we should expect an increase in the reporting of cases of men being sexually harassed by women. And, as has been the case with men, we should expect to see some of the accused women profess values that are contrary to engaging in such behavior.

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While the ideal of higher education is supposed to be above the concerns of mere money, there is nothing inherently wrong with for-profit colleges. Unless, of course, there is something inherently wrong with for-profit operations in general. As such, it should not be uncritically assumed that a for-profit college must be bad, ripping students off, or providing useless degrees. That said, the poor reputation of the for-profit colleges is well earned.

One rather tempting argument against for-profit colleges is that by being for-profit they must always charge students more or offer less than comparable non-profit colleges. After all, as the argument would go, a for-profit college would need to do all that a non-profit does and still make a profit. This would need to be done by charging more or offering less for the same money. However, this need not be the case.

Non-profit and public colleges are generally top-heavy in terms of administrators and administrative salaries. They also often expend considerable funds for amenities, sports teams and such. These “bloaters” are things that a well-run for-profit college could cut while still offering the core service of a college, namely education. For students who do not want the extras or who would rather not help fund a massive administration, this can be a win-win scenario: the student gets the education they want for less than they would pay elsewhere while the for-profit makes a profit by being efficient with its money. This is, obviously enough, the dreamy ideal of capitalism.

Sadly, the actual world sees this dream often transformed into a nightmare: for profit schools, in general, turn out to be as the Marxists that supposedly rule academia would expect: predatory and terrible. One main reason for this is that these entities are focused on making as much profit as possible and this consistently leads to the bad behavior endemic to the for-profit system. While regulation is supposed to keep the bad behavior in check, Betsy DeVos has curtailed oversight of these colleges. As a specific example, her department has stopped cooperating with New Jersey on the fraudulent activities of for-profit colleges. If the state neglects to check bad behavior, such as crossing borders illegally or welfare fraud, then people are limited only by their own values. While that can work in some cases, it is generally a bad idea to leave important matters up to the individual conscience. For example, it would be foolish for the state to just hand out welfare by simply trusting people and never verifying their claims. Likewise, it would be foolish to allow for-profit colleges to do as they wish without proper oversight.

As should be expected, I have consistently been against these terrible for-profit colleges. I also extend my opposition to terrible non-profits and public colleges: what I am against is the terrible part, not the profit part. As with much bad behavior that harms others, the most plausible solution is to have and enforce laws against that bad behavior. As noted above, those who are concerned about welfare fraud are not content to rely on the conscience of the recipients nor are they willing to simply allow an invisible hand to ensure that things work out properly. They, obviously enough, favor the creation and enforcement of laws to prevent people from committing this fraud. By parity of reasoning, for-profit colleges cannot be expected to operate virtuously with only the conscience of their owners as their guide. The invisible hand can also not be counted on to ensure that they do not engage in fraud and other misdeeds. What is needed, obviously enough, is the enforcement of the laws designed to protect taxpayers and students from being defrauded by the unscrupulous.

It could be argued that while the invisible hand and conscience cannot work in the case of, for example, welfare cheats, they work just fine in the context of business. In the case of for-profit schools, one might argue, they will fail if they do not behave well and the free market will sort things out. The easy and obvious reply is to agree that the bad colleges do fail, the problem is that they do a great deal of damage to the students and taxpayers in the process. This is a bit like arguing that society in general does not need laws, since eventually vigilantes might take care of any thieves, murderers and other threats. As Hobbes noted, the state of nature does not work terribly well.

This is not to say that I believe for-profits should be strangled by red-tape. Rather, the laws and enforcement need to focus on preventing harms like fraud. If a business model cannot succeed without including fraud and other misdeeds, then there is clearly a problem with that model.

While assessment has become embedded deeply into the body of education, when it first appeared I suspected it would be yet another fading fad of the academy. I recall, through the haze of the years, thinking of a modification of the old saying and coming up with “those who can do; those who can’t teach; those who can’t teach assess.” Back in those days, many professors regarded assessment as something of a scam: clever assessment “experts” getting well-paying positions or consulting gigs and then foisting the grunt work onto professors. The wilier (or lazy) professors responded by simply making up assessment data and noted that the effectiveness of their fictional data was identical to that of the real data. That is, not effective at all. I, like many professors, found myself in brave new world of assessment.

I eventually got dragged deep into the system of assessment. At the start, it fell on me to complete the assessment work for Philosophy & Religion. In 2004 I was given an eternal assignment to the General Education Assessment Committee (GEAC) and then made a co-chair. This resulted in me being on all the assessment committees. As such, I now have some experience with assessment.

On the one hand, I do retain much of my early skepticism of assessment. Much of it still seems to be at worst a scam and at best a waste of time. There is clearly a lot of money to be made in this area, money that is bleed away from other areas. Assessment also eats into the time of the faculty, time that could be used for teaching or research. There are also good questions about the effectiveness of assessment—even assessment that is done properly and sincerely.

On the other hand, my reading of Aristotle and experience as a teacher has led me to accept that there is merit in assessment that is properly done. The good and proper purpose of assessment is to evaluate the effectiveness of education in classes and in the institution as a whole. This is entirely reasonable—as Aristotle noted in his Nicomachean Ethics, if one aims to become a morally good person, then one needs an index of progress. In the case of virtue, Aristotle used pain and pleasure as his measure: if you feel increasing pleasure at doing good and increasing pain at doing wrong, then you are making progress. Using this indirect measure (to use an assessment term) enables one to assess their progress (or lack thereof). In the case of education, there must also be assessment. Otherwise one does not know how well they are doing at the task of educating the students.

One mantra among the assessment elite is “grades are not assessment.” While this has been challenged, I heard this being repeated as an article of faith by experts as recently as this month (March, 2018). To be fair, there is some truth to this mantra. One obvious concern is that grades often include factors irrelevant to properly assessing the quality of work. Professors often grant extra credit that is not based on merit and such things as attendance and participation can go into grades. For example, my students can get +5 points added on to a paper grade if they turn the paper in by the +5 bonus deadline. If these grades were blindly used for assessment, they would be off. This, I agree, is a factor than can make some grades less useful or even useless for assessment. However, it is easy enough to adjust for many of these situations. For example, knowing that the +5 bonus papers have a +5 bonus would allow them to be easily assessed using the grades. What I do, of course, is assess the papers using the proper assessment rubrics—to avoid getting another lecture on why grades are not assessment.

Another obvious concern is that professors tend to be inconsistent in their grading. For example, the way I grade a paper is different from that of a colleague so that a paper I grade as an 84 might be graded as a 79 or a 90 by a colleague. Part of this can be due to a professor being a harder or easier grader; part of it can also be due to using different standards. While this is a concern, the same problem can obviously apply to assessment. Different assessors will be harder or easier in their assessment. While having a standard rubric can help offset this, the subjectivity remains whether it is a grade or assessment. Another approach is to have multiple faculty assess the same artifacts. While a good idea, schools are rarely willing to compensate faculty for this extra work—and assessing entire classes of work takes long hours.

There are also the concerns that some faculty are bad at properly grading work and hence their grades are not legitimate assessments. While it is true that some faculty are bad at grading, this is not a problem with grading but a problem with the faculty. Addressing the shortcoming would fix two problems: bad grades and assessment. There is also the fact that people can be just as bad at assessment, especially when people are assigned to assess work outside of their field. For example, an English professor might be asked to assess philosophy papers for critical thinking or an engineering professor might be asked to review biology lab reports for written communication.

In closing, much of assessment is (to be honest) ineffective and a waste of resources. But, it is beloved by many state legislatures and is part of the business model that now rules higher education. As such, it is not a fading fad. The challenge, then, is to turn assessment into something effective and useful—something I have been endeavoring to do.

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My adopted state of Florida has mandated that public universities offer 40% of undergraduate classes online by 2025. Some Florida universities have already jumped on the online bandwagon, perhaps because they can impose an extra distance learning fee on top of the standard tuition cost. The state legislature recently capped the fee at $30, although some schools already offer lower tuition and fees for students enrolled only in online classes. Governor Scott has contended that online classes should cost less than in-person classes. Proponents of the fee contend that it is needed to fund the development of online classes. This situation raises two important questions. One is the question of whether there should be such an emphasis on online classes. The other is the question of whether a special fee should be charged for such classes. I’ll begin with the question of the fee.

As noted above, the main justification for charging a distance learning fee for online classes is that the extra money is needed to develop such classes. This presumably includes the cost of developing the content of the class itself and the cost of the infrastructure to deliver it.

Since I have taught hybrid classes for years, I can attest to the fact that properly preparing an online class requires significantly more effort than properly preparing a traditional classroom class. One obvious factor is that an online class should include online media, such as videos and audio recordings. Creating such media is time consuming and requires both technical and media skills. Developing these skills requires training. Because more labor and training must be put into preparing an online class, it is reasonable to charge the extra fee.

One obvious counter to this is to point to my own experience: while I have undergone training for creating online classes, the entire workload of preparing my online classes has fallen on me and I do not get any extra pay to do this extra work. This is not unusual—my workload and performance are disconnected from my compensation. If this same practice is followed by other schools, then they would be hard pressed to justify the extra fees—unless they are fully justified by the cost of training faculty to do the extra work at no extra compensation. There is also the obvious fact that students do not pay an extra fee when they take a class from better paid professors, even though the professor thus imposes a greater cost on the school.

In terms of arguing against the fee, there is the claim that students who take online classes graduate faster than students who do not. Since Florida is pushing hard to reduce the time it takes to graduate, providing a disincentive to take online classes would run counter to that goal. There are also various financial arguments. One is that shifting classes online will reduce the need for classroom construction, which will save the state money (but cost construction jobs). If online classes save the state money, it makes it hard to argue that the extra fee is needed. Rather, this would support the claim that there should not be such a special fee.

While I rarely agree with Governor Scott, I do agree with him that there should not be a fee. I would hold to this position even if I was given extra compensation for teaching online classes—although I do not think that would ever happen. I now turn to the question of whether there should be a push for online classes.

One obvious concern about entirely online classes is that they have a significantly higher failure rate than hybrid and traditional classes. In some rare cases students forget they are even enrolled in online classes; but that also seems to happen in traditional classes. To be honest, classes are sometimes poorly designed by faculty who are struggling to operate well outside of their technical skills. Poorly designed or poorly run classes can certainly contribute to student failure.

There is also the fact that students are also often ill-equipped to learn from online classes. Speaking with students from various schools about online classes, the usual refrain I hear involves the poor quality of many of the courses and how hard it is to learn even in a well-designed class. Students also tend to admit that they are less motivated in online classes. Because of these factors, it makes sense that failure rates would be higher in online classes. There are, of course, some excellent online classes and students who can adapt effectively to online learning.

A second concern, which ties into the first, is the quality of learning in online classes. Obviously, poorly designed and poorly taught classes will leave students on their own when it comes to learning. But, even for well-designed and well-taught classes there is still the concern about student learning. Colleagues of mine have made the reasonable point that some classes would work poorly online, even if everyone was doing their best. To be fair, a similar complaint can be made about traditional and hybrid classes: how much do students really learn and how much do they retain? One might suspect that the answer to both is “very little.”

Faculty have also expressed some concern that the rise of online classes will mean that they will be replaced by “robots.” That is, automated online classes will be substituted for faculty taught classes, perhaps with graduate students or other low-cost labor hired to do such tasks as grading papers and answering questions. Some might see this as a good thing: not having to pay as many faculty could allow for lower tuition (or greater profits and administrator salaries). There would also be, to some, a benefit in having course content closely controlled by administrators.

On the positive side, online classes do allow students far more convenience. For example, people who work full-time can work online classes into their schedule even when they would be unable to attend classes on campus during normal times. Students can also take classes at universities far from where they live (although most online students do live near the campus) or simply avoid the hassle of trying to park on campus.

Because of these factors, my opinion on online classes is split. On the one hand, the flexibility that online classes offer is a significant plus. On the minus side, I do have concerns about the educational experience students might experience as well as the high failure rates that often plague such classes. That said, I do think that the failure rate problem can be addressed as can concerns about the quality of education in online classes.